How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

by Crystal Marie Fleming

one of the main consequences of centuries of racism is that we are all systematically exposed to racial stupidity and racist beliefs that warp our understandings of society, history, and ourselves.

When social scientists describe racism as “systemic,” we’re referring to collective practices and representations that disadvantage categories of human beings on the basis of their perceived “race.” The key word here is “collective.”

The bottom line is that white supremacy is about resources: who gets (and retains) access to them, who gets excluded, whose lives are made to matter, and whose lives are rendered disposable.

Have you ever heard racial idiots say that racism doesn’t exist simply because they haven’t experienced it—or because they don’t want to believe those who have been targeted by racial exploitation and terror? This is an example of racial gaslighting: denying the existence of racial oppression.

The Class Fallacy is the wrong-headed notion that wealthy and “educated” whites are somehow immune to racism and absolved from complicity with racial domination.

Just as patriarchy makes room for women—especially when they remain subordinate to men—white supremacy has historically made room for people of color who were willing to accommodate white dominance.

This book is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. I am not going to coddle you. I am not going to hold your hand. What I am going to do is wig-snatch the hell outta white supremacy.

racial history is routinely minimized and distorted within our (mis)educational system. Not only is it highly unlikely that you learned much of substance about race or racism at school; it is also highly likely that you absorbed racist propaganda.

Critical race theory is an interdisciplinary body of scholarship that emerged in the aftermath of the civil rights movement as legal theorists grappled with naming and challenging the persistence of racism after the fall of de jure segregation. Born in the mid-1970s, CRT boldly embraced an overtly activist agenda: the promotion of racial justice and the eradication of racial oppression. Bridging legal analysis with storytelling and narratives centering the experiences of people of color, critical race theorists set about to unveil and address the persistence of racism and white dominance.

As long as the endemic, systemic nature of white supremacy is successfully minimized or denied, as long as “conversations about race” are mainly about individual attitudes, prejudice, or the actions of a few extremists, then attention is drawn away from the structures and pattern of racial inequality hiding in plain sight.

Nationwide, white families hold thirteen times the wealth of black families.

racism comprises both individual and institutional components, though most people only think about racism as an individual, personal trait. But if you’re going to wrap your head around how racial oppression actually operates, you have to move beyond simplistic individual notions and grasp how racism becomes institutionalized in the ideas and routine practices of our social organizations: our families, our laws and policies, our educational system and decisions and structures shaping the representation of race we absorb from the media. From mass incarceration to sentencing laws to racial discrimination in housing and home loans, the invisibility of institutional racism is maintained by the fact that it is literally hard to see.

White supremacy continues to persist, in part, due to the widespread temptation to only see and condemn other people’s racism—racism is always someone else’s crime.

Others will object and say that condemning the founders for their moral crimes against humanity is unfair, because it means using our current values to judge historical figures. But this narrative—long dominant (and typically invoked by white men)—deliberately ignores the fact that people spoke out against and opposed white supremacist genocide and chattel slavery while these things were happening.

Black women are well acquainted with being framed as inappropriately “angry” or “playing the victim” when we simply acknowledge the conditions of our lives.

Trump is often described by his supporters as someone who “tells it like it is” and says what people think. What this really means is that Trump says what many white people think, including the white supremacist views that are usually expressed behind closed doors.

This is what Leslie Picca and Joe Feagin mean by “two-faced racism”: white folks’ public, and hypocritical, posturing as “non-racist” even as they practice racist behavior in the comfort of all-white settings. For almost fifty years, the white “backstage,” maintained by segregation and protected from the eyes and ears of people of color, allowed millions of whites to privately express their rage and hostility toward minorities while portraying white supremacy as a thing of the past.

Though I am critical of Democrats’ pathetic attempts to blame racism on Republicans, we need to be able to hold multiple truths simultaneously: racism is systematic and infiltrates our entire political system, and yes, voting for an overt racist and supporting his racist agenda is a racist thing to do.

The idea that Obama-Trump voters could not be racist simply because they once voted for a black man is a strange and persistent delusion, one connected to the broader fantasy that liberals, and Democrats specifically, are somehow immune to racial animus.50 But quiet as it’s kept, there really are millions of Democrats who oppose racial equality and embrace racist beliefs. Though white Republicans express racist views at a higher rate than white Democrats, nearly one in four white Democrats believe that African Americans are lazier than whites and about one-fifth of white Democrats view African Americans as less intelligent.

But many liberals still cleave to the fairytale that membership in the Democratic Party provides immunity from racism.

Have you ever wondered how people lived with slavery, Jim Crow, and lynching but looked the other way? Look around right now. This is how they did it. They did it by going on with their lives. They did it by being polite, not rocking the boat. They did it by surrendering their critical thinking. They did it by cowering to demagogues and bullies. If the election of a man endorsed by a white supremacist terror group isn’t enough to wake you the hell up, then I’m afraid that nothing will.

White supremacist social arrangements and beliefs are woven into the fabric of our everyday lives. White supremacy is, in fact, so normal, so systemic, pervasive, and taken for granted that it is almost never acknowledged, much less opposed, by members of the majority population. Thus, the idea that white supremacy ceased to exist in the distant past but then suddenly became normalized in the last few years is, on its face, a lie—one sustained, primarily, by the KKK Fallacy, as well as the Political Fallacy, outlined previously.

the main lesson most whites absorbed from the civil rights era wasn’t that they have a personal responsibility to fight systemic racism but, rather, that they have a responsibility to maintain a public appearance of being “nonracist” even as racism pervades their lives.

Drawing upon the accounts of more than six hundred white college students across the country, the researchers pored over journal accounts of thousands of events that the students defined as “racial incidents” in their everyday interactions. The considerable volume and content of the student reports (collected over a period of several weeks) provide stunning insight into the sheer frequency and normality of racist behavior and comments in the lives of white Americans. Some of the most interesting findings pertain to whites’ reactions to other whites who criticize their racism. Significantly, when whites censure each other for racist behavior or remarks, Picca and Feagin show it is often the public nature of the racist performance that’s framed as a problem, not white racism itself. The same racist comments and behavior that many whites tolerate or participate in themselves behind closed doors become problematic and inappropriate in public. Thus, the problem, for many whites, isn’t white racism or systemic dominance; it’s a failed public performance of being nonracist.

The authors note that whites typically ignored, tolerated, or encouraged each other’s racism and sometimes admitted (in the privacy of their journals) to participating in racist behavior themselves. Moreover, on the rare occasions when the students said they called out white racism, they were frequently censured and socially punished. According to the student reports, whites frequently accuse other whites who criticize their racism of being “offensive” or ridicule their sensitivity or lack of humor.

When whites respond to white critique of their racism with apologies, they also typically issue denials (“I didn’t mean anything by it”). Picca and Feagin also show that the small minority of whites who called out white racism behind closed doors reported having to “work up the courage,” as they knew their critique would disrupt the white comfort their peers are accustomed to maintaining in the absence of people of color.

Latinos are the most negatively portrayed ethnoracial group on prime-time television, typically portrayed as criminals and foreigners with heavy accents, while white characters are generally shown as “solidly middle income, fair with regard to skin and hair color, devoid of a heavy accent, articulate, respected” and “viewed as moral and admirable characters.”

This routinized association between whiteness and moral goodness is also evident in the images that appear on the news. Think, for example, of Brock Turner, the white Stanford University student accused of rape and convicted of sexual assault in 2016. Local police refused to release his mug shot to the public until the end of his trial, which meant that media outlets used his respectable yearbook photo (complete with suit and tie) to depict a sexual offender.

Coddling and normalizing bigots is as American as apple pie.

Here’s a number for you: six. That would be the number of corporations that control 90 percent of all mass-produced media.29 Last I checked, the CEO of every single one of these companies (Time Warner, Disney, Comcast, News Corp, CBS, and Viacom) was a white man.

In other words, mainstream media blackened the portrayal of poverty, depicting African Americans as impoverished more than twice as often as we would expect given their actual representation among the poor. Tellingly, Gilens also found that magazine stories about the “underclass” focused exclusively on the black poor.34 The overrepresentation of black poverty and the underrepresentation of white poverty have clear implications for public support for social safety nets and poverty programs. Polling data has demonstrated that whites are less likely to support policies to help the poor when they associate poverty with blackness.35 Given that whites do, as a rule, chronically overestimate the percentage of blacks in poverty and grossly underestimate the number of white folks in poverty, media distortions that are repeated day after day, year after year, are clearly implicated in the reproduction of racist stereotypes and the miseducation of the public.

A 2015 study by Color of Change, an advocacy group, found that every single news network in New York City overrepresented African Americans as criminal offenders—by an average of 24 percent above their actual arrest rate.36 While blacks represented 51 percent of all arrested New Yorkers, they were 75 percent of the criminal perpetrators shown on the local news.

White supremacist policies and practices ensure that people of color are disproportionately monitored, criminalized, policed, and incarcerated—and racist media coverage ensures that people of color are depicted in ways that justify those same policies and practices. As the study states clearly, officers “over target . . . [and] the news media exaggerate.”40 The end result? Millions of people go to sleep every night after being indoctrinated with police propaganda, inaccurate images of black criminality, and false portrayals of white innocence. And many of them wake up the next day proclaiming that they “don’t see race.” But we know from well-established research that the psychological consequences of being systematically exposed to racist ideas are wide-ranging.

Why oh why do people still believe that interracial love (or sex) can end racism when thousands of years of heterosexual love and sex have quite obviously failed to end patriarchy?

But, even as white men gave themselves permission to rape and sexually abuse enslaved black women, men, and children, they also developed policies prohibiting interracial marriage (known as “antimiscegenation laws”) and crafted negative stereotypes portraying their victims as sexual deviants.9

“blacks have ten times as many black friends as white friends. But white Americans have an astonishing 91 times as many white friends as black friends.” Even more disturbingly, sociological research indicates that whites typically use their sporadic and “casual acquaintances” with people of color to behave in a racist manner “with a clear conscience.”22 In other words, for many whites, the functional role of their black or brown “friends” is to give themselves even more permission to be racist without viewing themselves as such.